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Late last night, I joined them as they offered bowls of chilli in a parking lot near Warmland House and invited people to warm themselves in front of two small propane heaters.
It’s one thing to imagine people stuck outside without adequate shelter in the winter. It’s another to stand with them for just one hour, as the temperature dips close to freezing at the beginning of a long night.
I met a grandmother who told me that she could have a place to stay in three days if she went to Victoria. “Why do you stay here?” I asked her.
“My kids,” she said, her voice breaking. Her daughter works two jobs but gets Tuesdays off, so they spend every Tuesday together. Her daughter has a son and another child on the way. She wants her mom around, to be with the kids.
The grandmother told me so much more — about her traumas and injuries, her many health issues, the cruelty of strangers, how she just wants to give up.
Later, after telling me about her kids, she said that she can’t stop trying, even though it’s hard.
She made me laugh, too. She was warm and funny, even as she shivered under a pink blanket that seemed to swallow her whole.
If you walked by her on the street, I doubt you’d see her face. She slouched over from the pain of a bad back, broken in two places in a car accident decades ago. Her head hung all the way down to her chest.
But I’ve seen her face, and I can tell you that it’s beautiful.
I drove home on a heated seat to a warm bed, knowing that there’s a beautiful grandmother with a cheeky sense of humour spending the night out in the cold.
Now you know, too.
I just spoke with Duncan Mayor Michelle Staples, hoping for an update on efforts to establish an extreme weather shelter. She told me that the responsibility has shifted to Emergency Management Cowichan, as part of a legislative change that came into effect only in recent weeks.
What will happen next is still unclear, but I’ll reach out to Emergency Management Cowichan to see what else I can learn.
“Don't ever think that people have stopped or ever will stop trying to find a solution,” Michelle told me.
“It's not just elected officials that need to be making decisions on how we take care of the most vulnerable people in our community — it's all of us, as community members,” she added. “We have to come to terms with the situation that we're in, and that's an obligation of all of us.”
It’s messy, it’s complicated. But humans are capable of working together to solve hard problems. If a community decided together that no person seeking warmth will be denied it, what could stand in its way?
Maybe I’m dreaming.
Maybe you’ll dream with me?
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